


the queen of hearts is always your best bet

by onedogtown



Category: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 00:30:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5949229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onedogtown/pseuds/onedogtown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heading east.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the queen of hearts is always your best bet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



The three of them ended up riding to New York City in high style, on the Union Pacific Railroad itself. Butch found it hard to credit, although he guessed that it wasn’t the first place that he would have thought to look for them, either. 

It was Etta's plan; Butch on his own had come up with a vague notion that they might ride on horseback the whole way, which would ask a lot of the horses, not to mention the local police departments. The thought of using trains built and owned by the man who was chasing them down was pleasing to him in its symmetry; he was ready to go out and buy the tickets as soon as Etta made the suggestion. 

Sundance, of course, had to make it exciting. Sundance had liked Butch’s plan, or so he said after hearing Etta's. Butch thought that it was mostly that he was still nervous, and felt that he had to argue against something, but he wished that Sundance had chosen to argue against something that Butch had said. Butch knew how to handle him when he was in a mood, out of long practice.

Etta, on the other hand, was not in a mood to handle anybody. She was still unnaturally quiet and undemonstrative hours after their return, with a look on her face he’d never seen there before — an expression of contemplation, maybe, or fear; he made a note to ask her about it later, if he was able to get her alone. Butch thought that she was still grieving for them, after reading their obituaries, but they didn’t have time for that; they had a few day’s lead, maybe, before it would become obvious that their bodies hadn’t washed up anywhere, and then Harriman’s gang would be on the hunt again. Looking at in in that light, maybe it was unsurprising that Sundance and Etta would take refuge in distraction. Butch was just sorry they were taking so long about it, since he didn’t feel right leaving them alone and he wanted to sleep at some point.

Finally he halted the argument by grabbing Sundance by the elbow and bodily pulling him out the front door, for the sake of peace and their eventual escape. He made an apologetic face at Etta as they passed, which she shrugged resignedly at.

“Will you calm down already?” he asked Sundance when they were outside. It was late enough in the year to get chilly at night.

“What I want to know is, what does a schoolteacher know about outrunning a posse?” Sundance asked sullenly. “What happened to your great brain for plans?” 

Butch paused for a moment, trying to muster all the conviction that he had left when he was this level of tired.

“I’m listening to her, because I don’t know anything about this,” he said finally, talking slowly but intently, in the same way he’d try and calm a skittish horse. “I can make plans for a job, because I’ve done two hundred of every kind of them, and I have a sense of it. I don’t have any experience with leaving the country while being chased by a posse. This seems like a good plan, to my eyes.”

Sundance didn’t say anything to that, and Butch couldn’t read his face for the darkness. Butch mostly felt relieved that Sundance didn’t seem to realize that Butch had just argued against his ability to judge how well Etta’s plan would work. It depended more on how you said it, he reflected.

To his mind, Etta was especially trustworthy in matters like this, which involved the behavior of other people; she lived in society, as opposed to dipping in and out of it as needed, and thus could judge its likely workings. She had a careful mind, too, one that was sharpest in the details, like a steel trap or a bank clerk. Butch, whose mind tended to work in broad sweeps, appreciated the advantages that this brought when figuring out a problem.

“Listen,” he added, “she’s right about it being a good disguise, the train. Same as how there’s only two men on the wanted posters, not two men and a lady, and you were the one who came up with that.”

Sundance sucked in an irritated breath and said, “Goddammit,” as if he was preparing himself to fight to the death any opinion that contradicted his own— but he was the one who walked back to the house, after a minute, dragging his feet as if he was really being sent to war. Butch let him go without following. He was idly curious to see how it turned out, but this, he knew, was between the two of them, and it wasn’t much use in getting in the middle of it.

He gave them a while, standing around awkwardly in the yard until Etta came out the front door and said with a good imitation of her usual spark, “Butch, for God’s sake, you’re going to get chilled.” And when Butch went out to sleep in the barn a while later along with the horses, Sundance didn’t follow him, which Butch supposed told him all about the situation without needing to put himself in a position to ask.

\--

Etta, at Sundance’s insistence, was the one to buy the tickets. Butch and Sundance huddled on a bench a good distance away, trying to keep their faces angled away from any passerby. Butch felt comforted by the fact that their wanted posters showed two men standing straight with normal posture, and not one man tipped back with a hat over his face and another slumped forward with his head in his hands.

Neither of them had much to say to the other. Butch followed Etta out of the corner of his eye and nursed his own doubts over the likelihood of this working; he suspected Sundance was doing the same. From what he could see, Etta was moving coolly and naturally, drawing no attention besides that which was naturally accorded to a beautiful woman in an relatively isolated western town.

What Butch was thinking about was that it was a little surprising that all three of them were heading out together. Not that he would have left Etta behind for the world, but there was a little edge of worry in his thinking, that they might get out of the country alive and then have to think about what to do next, and it would be Butch’s job to decide. He hadn’t slept for most of the previous night for thinking it over.

“What do you think we should do with the horses?” Sundance asked. Butch blinked. It was not a subject that occupied much of his mind, and he was a little surprised that it was on Sundance’s.

“Leave them, I guess,” he said after a while. Sundance shrugged.

Then Etta was heading back, tickets bought from an unsuspecting conductor, and it was time to start hauling trunks and hatboxes to the train itself. There was a big wardrobe to transport, all of it entirely unworn; Etta had left behind pretty much everything from her old life that she’d had occasion to use, except a few books and photographs. 

The clothes had started out after Etta and Sundance had begun seeing each other, and Sundance had been nervous and wanting to buy her things every time they were going to meet— the kind of beautiful, tailored outfits and hats that Etta liked and which were right out of McCall’s Magazine, no matter how little use it all was to someone who spent most her time teaching children the three Rs. Butch had thought that it was sweet, and it had finally paid off, now that Etta had occasion to cast aside plain calico for good.

“My husband and I are travelling with my brother back to New York,” Etta was saying to a man in a suit who Butch thought must be the porter. “Oh, here they are.”

She was back to what Butch thought of as her schoolmarm demeanor. He put an arm around her shoulder in what he hoped came off as a brotherly way, and smiled brightly at the porter.

“The three of us are pretty excited for the trip,” Butch said in answer to some polite question, which was true. If their plan went off correctly, they’d be in the U.S.A. for only another few weeks. It was bizarre to think about.

The train was nice from the inside, which was an angle that Butch had little experience with. Etta turned out to have gotten two compartments, one for her and Sundance, and the one next to that for Butch on his own. Somewhere in the back of his mind he felt uneasy about that, although it wasn’t as if they’d all fit well into one of them, even if they stood the whole way to New York City.

The drawback to a train journey as Butch figured it, besides the fact that he wouldn’t be able to balance when walking, was that there was no place to run to if they were caught and Etta wouldn’t be able to survive a jump off the side, if it came to that. Well, none of them would be able to survive that, although they’d been unreasonably lucky in such matters recently, but it wouldn’t be right to ask even an attempt of Etta. If it came to that, they’d have to take someone hostage and get off the train that way. Luckily Sundance was armed, although Butch could also see how that fact could easily end up working against them.

\--

The trip itself, after all the worry and friction leading up to it, was absolutely an anticlimax. The interior of the train was beautiful; Butch kept pausing to stroke the wallpaper or the cushions and feel proud that he had chosen such a beautiful example of a line to rob, twice. The two traveling with him were uninterested, since they were still occupied with being sore at each other. Etta expressed this by retreating to her compartment and drawing the shades, and Sundance found a poker game going on one car over and occupied himself by glaring at people while depriving them of their money. Butch mostly felt sorry for them, that they weren’t enjoying the trip as much as he was.

Mostly he alternated back and forth between the two of them the entire first day, feeling that his presence offered the possibility of reconciliation. He would have preferred to stick with Etta— she had gone eerily contemplative and spent a lot of time with a book that looked like poetry open in her lap, staring out of the window, and when he spoke to her she answered perfectly politely but let the conversation die off if left to her own devices. He thought that she was occupied inside her own head, and it wasn’t a place that exactly seemed to fill her with joy at the moment. That was a feeling that he understood, especially at the moment, Even if she didn’t want to talk, Butch felt that it was his part of his role as her pretend brother to offer comfort by his presence. 

Chaperoning Sundance was both more exciting and probably more necessary, considering the high probability that one of the other players would smell a rat after a few too many losses and Sundance would handle it in the only way he knew how to, which was with bullets. His trouble was, as always, how good he was. Butch had never asked, except as a joke, whether Sundance cheated with cards, but he knew from long and bitter experience that no matter how good a hand he was dealt, Sundance would end up with a better one. 

Butch did not care to bet against him, but he tried to offset any imprudent accusations that might drift their way by offering Sundance advice in view of the other players, so that they would assume that that was the reason he was doing so well. Since Sundance had refused to leave his chair so that Butch could explain this to him, he mostly responded with irritation to Butch’s thoughtfulness, which Butch kindly did not take offense to. If you were able to look past his surly expression, Sundance cut a fine figure at the card table, with his good looks and new fitted suit. Butch enjoyed watching him.

“Listen, Kid— I call him that because he’s younger than me,” Butch said, switching focus to the man sitting next to him. The man looked confused but not disbelieving, which was a relief. Turning back to Sundance, Butch said, “Listen, my advice here would be—“

“Get the hell out of here,” Sundance snapped.

“All right, all right,” Butch said, graciously willing to take a hint.

He went back to Etta’s compartment, banging into the sides of the train as they turned a corner. Etta was still sitting immobile, with her eyes trained out the window. She turned to look when Butch opened the door and stepped in. “Hey, Etta,” he said, conversational capabilities exhausted, and sat across from her.

The silence that followed, under all of Butch’s worries, was almost companionable.

“Looks like that’s the last of Wyoming,” said Butch after a while, looking out of the window.

It was a pretty sight, and it occupied his thoughts for a few moments. When he turned back to face Etta, intending to make some remarks on the subject, she was crying. It took Butch aback.

“Oh, Etta, don’t,” he said, panicking, and got up to sit next to her. “Everything— everything’s going great, Etta, don’t worry.”

She didn’t really need to be comforted, she was crying so softly— just a few tears slipping down her cheeks, and she started wiping those off as soon as Butch spoke. She looked pale and restrained rather than upset, and although Butch had intended to comfort her physically, something in her expression made him keep his arm by his side.

“I’m sorry,” Etta said finally, looking at him directly for the first time that day. “I know, nothing’s really wrong. We’re leaving Wyoming, like we planned, and it’s just— I was so happy there, with you two.”

“You’re going to be happy in Bolivia too, I promise,” Butch said helplessly, despite everything he’d been thinking.

Etta shook her head quickly and said, “But how can you know that? I know Spanish, and you can rob banks, but none of us has any idea how any of this will happen. It’s all unknown, and, God, Butch, don’t think less of me, but I love both of you too much to watch you die. And I can’t talk to Sundance about this, I don’t know how to.” 

She spoke slowly and carefully, as if she’d been going over this train of thought for long enough to have it memorized. Butch wished that it was only him that thought like this. At the same time he wanted to tell her that, in a way that wouldn’t make her more unhappy. 

“Oh, Etta,” he said. They sat quietly for a minute. “Do you want me to get him?” Butch asked finally.

When she nodded, he kissed her impulsively on the forehead and then got up quickly, without meeting her eyes. 

The poker game was, of course, still in progress and seemed to have added a few players. Sundance, the moment he saw Butch, rolled his eyes and said “You’re back? That didn’t take long.”

“You wife needs you,” Butch said, and then added “She’s my sister,” in case anyone listening was wondering why he’d been in her compartment. 

Say would you would about Sundance’s character— most of the time Butch would argue in favor of it existing— but he loved Etta; he was off without even bothering to put his cards face-down.

“Is he coming back?” one of the other card players asked.

“No, I’m sitting in for him,” Butch said, deciding to occupy himself and give the lovebirds some space.

Later, after he’d lost most of the money in his pockets— not an issue, since the trip lasted another few days, and he figured that Sundance would have won all of it back with interest by then— he saw through the glass of the door Etta and Sundance, nestled together in their compartment, sweet enough that he felt a lump in his throat. Well, he was a romantic; half the girls in the western part of the country could attest to that. He went into his compartment without giving them so much as a wave, figuring that the two of them would want some alone time and it wasn’t friendly to give them social obligations to fulfill under these conditions.

After a few minutes he heard a tapping on his door and Etta saying softly, “Butch, you in there?” He didn’t say anything, and then after a while he heard her leave.

Butch sat in his compartment, thinking, and then he took a nap during dinnertime— he wasn’t excited to explain to Etta why he’d walked off and ignored her— and then he woke up in the night and thought some more, and couldn’t help but come to a painful conclusion. Which was that they weren’t all going to Bolivia, or at least, they shouldn’t be. It was funny that for so long they’d been talking about how two wanted men could disguise themselves by adding a woman to their party, and no one had ever mentioned that they could disguise themselves even better by splitting up.

Well, that wasn’t so surprising, that three people who cared for each other would avoid the subject of a separation. Which didn’t mean that it wasn’t a necessary one. The conclusion that Butch had come to was unavoidably that this situation was bad for Sundance and Etta. They were a nice young couple, and they needed to learn how to stand on their own feet without support from an interested third party. They could have Bolivia; Butch could give them that, and he’d do— something. He was no one’s father, or brother, and he couldn’t take care of them forever.

It was very dark outside by then. The train was nearing a stand of trees, which in better days would have been a good spot to mount an ambush from. A week ago, that would have been the main subject of Butch’s thoughts. Now most of the Hole in the Wall men were dead or captured, and their last horses had been left tethered to a post near the train station, in hopes that someone would take advantage of the situation without contracting authorities. He couldn’t help wondering if Etta’s fears were right, and they were leaving something important behind them. It was an awful thought if it was true, because then it was his fault, and E. H. Harriman was just a trigger for it.

The worst of it was that just when Butch had sighed and decided to try and go to sleep— his restless night in the barn the night earlier had taken a lot out of him— that was when the noises started up from one compartment over. It seemed that he wasn’t the only one in this part of the train who had decided to react to the time of night, although in his defense he was less noisy about it. Even with a pillow over his head he could still hear them, deriving pleasure from each other’s bodies.

Sundance was the easiest to ignore. Not that Butch had had much occasion to overhear him— he had, in fact, deliberately avoided being in situations were he would be in close proximity to Sundance and Etta, together— but it was conceivable, in a different world where Sundance had ever had eyes for any girl but Etta, that he might have heard Sundance making noises like these in many different contexts. Butch had brought enough girls along while they were hiding in the upstairs of some saloon or whorehouse, and Sundance had been such a good sport about it, that it was easy to imagine Butch becoming used to him enough to be unaffected. Etta, on the other hand— no, that was not imaginable. Every time she moaned on the other side of the thin wooden partition he felt himself getting more restless and uncomfortable. 

The only upside to the situation was that no one had started shooting yet, which was always a possibility, with these two. That would definitely have brought the conductor running.

\--

Butch was unable to sleep for what felt like hours, until the other compartment had final quieted down, and then he overslept and missed breakfast being served. The whole thing put him in about the worst humor imaginable, but he resolved to hide it, for Sundance and Etta’s sakes.

He went in to see them that morning. The two of them were still in their compartment, Sundance having apparently abandoned the poker game in favor of one of the terrible children’s paperbacks about brave cowboys that Etta was always confiscating from her students. She was reading the morning’s paper. To Butch’s irritated eyes there was an aura of happiness around them that was probably a result of what they had been doing to disturb him the previous night. 

“Oh, hello, Butch,” Etta said, looking bright-eyed and unfairly pretty. “Did you sleep well?”

Butch, who was still resentful over his murdered sleep the previous night, decided nonetheless to be fair. “Yes,” he said, smiling at her, and then, without intending to, when her eyes slipped back to her newspaper: “Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to the two of you about.”

It was not a conversation that he wanted to have, but he still found himself affecting a cheerful and matter of fact tone and saying, “Maybe it was a bad idea of mine, all of us going on the run together. It’s more dangerous. My thinking is that the two of you head on to easy pickings in Bolivia, and I meet up with an old friend in New York City and stick around there for a spell.”

It was a harder speech to get out than he’d expected it to, and he delivered it with his eyes trained into space, not meeting anyone’s eyes. When he looked down and saw Etta’s expression, something seized up in his chest, and he stopped talking without meaning to.

From the other side of the compartment, Sundance snorted and said, “Who exactly do you know in New York City?”

“Butch,” Etta said intently. “I don’t think that any of us cares if us traveling together makes this more dangerous. This trip started out with the three of us, and that’s how I hope that’s it’ll end, too. You don’t have to worry about taking care of the two of us, anyway—“

“He just wants us to reassure him, Etta, don’t go crazy,” Sundance said, not looking up from his dime novel. “He’s nervous that now that we’re getting along we won’t like him as much.”

“Shut us, Sundance,” Butch said.

“He gets insecure,” Sundance said mercilessly, still talking to Etta. “You should have seen him the first time he found out I could outshoot him.”

“Oh, is that all it is?” Etta asked, sounding relieved. “In that case, I’m going to tell the porter that we found a rat in your compartment and I want him to make up a bed on the floor in here. You’ll never feel left out again.”

“That is not what I want,” Butch said. 

“But you slept so well last night,” Etta said. He was starting to feel all his sensible, hardheaded resolve melting away despite himself. 

“Butch, you’re the only reason we’re going anywhere near South America, anyway,” Etta said. “If you slipped of the train somewhere we’d count it as a bad joke and turn around and find you.” 

She was smiling so that Butch was all set to give up his dignity and agree with her, just to keep that expression on her face, when she leaned forward and kissed him. Butch shut his eyes automatically and then pulled back, feeling too stunned to speak.

“Is that what it takes to shut him up?” Sundance asked. “God, I’m just sorry that I didn’t know that five years ago.”

“I’m going to tell the porter about the rat problem,” Etta said decisively, getting up. Butch thought that she was blushing, but that might have been a trick of the light.

Before she left, Butch forced his tongue to work and said, “You know, I hope that it’s the three of us at the end of this, too.” They looked at each other for a minute, and Butch felt oddly lightened by the knowledge that she was afraid of the same things as he was.

“I’ll kiss you too, if you want,” Sundance said as she closed the door behind her.

“Don’t get cocky,” Butch said. It didn’t seem like Sundance was going to punch him, anyway, which was a relief.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sundance said. “See, I know how to handle you when you’re in a mood.” 

Butch snorted, feeling a little dizzy in the head. It was turning into a much better morning than he’d have expected just a few hours ago.

“So was that what you intended to happen?” Sundance asked, going back to his book.

“You know, it might have been,” Butch said.


End file.
